


ghost page

by fuhllmetal



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Acceptance, Dreams, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Lucid Dreaming, M/M, Post-Kerberos Mission Failure, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash, Speculation, keith believes shiro is dead, some set-up for how keith finds voltron
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-24
Updated: 2016-08-24
Packaged: 2018-08-10 17:46:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7854928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuhllmetal/pseuds/fuhllmetal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>keith dreams of shiro, but it's not the same as it was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ghost page

The night sky was filled with stars even though Keith was in a huge, sprawling city, the buildings twinkling with their own ethereal light, and the streets were completely empty except for him. He was walking down the road, alone, his hands shoved in his pockets, but even though it was as desolate as could be, he still felt like someone was watching him intently from behind.

Shaking off the strange sensation, Keith continued down the empty street. Cars only passed every few minutes. There were no people walking on either side of the road, but the buildings still shone as if there was activity within them. When Keith decided to have a look around, he went up to a building and tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Strange.

 

Keith pushed that aside and determined that he probably wouldn’t have found much of interest in an office building, anyway, and continued down the road. After what felt like an eternity of walking, he finally passed a person, but when he tried to talk to them, they vanished up in smoke.

He frowned and kept walking. The endless stroll was starting to get tedious, especially after realizing that everything he tried to interact with was completely unresponsive. The stars hanging over his head like fairy lights twinkled mockingly at him.

The farther he got down the street, Keith realized that it was opening up like the front end of a funnel into a wide expanse of space, and the asphalt melted away into muddy grass wet with dew. Bleachers lined the edges of the grass, and two goals were at the north and south of where he was facing. He was in the middle of a soccer field.

 

The singular moon hanging overhead multiplied into four moons that shone down as spotlights on the field, lighting it up for the two teams that materialized. Keith ran off the field as the ball was kicked off just a few feet away from him. He took refuge in the stands, sitting as far away from the loudly cheering crowd as possible, and watched the game.

The players were zipping all around in Galaxy Garrison uniforms, and the ball was shaped like a miniature Kerberos. Whenever the players would try to kick it, their feet would freeze, so a coach brought out a giant bucket of slipper-cleats. The game went off without a hitch from that point forward.

“Good thing they brought the slipper-cleats,” a voice behind Keith quipped. He swiveled around to meet it, surprised that there was someone anywhere near this side of the stands, and was met with a very familiar presence.

It was Shiro. But wasn’t there something wrong with this? Why _shouldn’t_ Shiro be here?

 

Shiro was dead; he couldn’t be anywhere. Keith jolted at that realization and was promptly hit over the head with the sudden lucidity of his dream.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, Keith wrapped his arms around Shiro’s neck without a second thought, and Shiro reciprocated immediately. Keith clung to the other man for dear life, straight sobbing into his shoulder, and Shiro kept whispering something that Keith couldn’t understand into his ear. It sounded like a singular word in an alien language, but it resonated with him on a deep level that he couldn’t even begin to pick apart now, so he just set it aside as general dream weirdness.

Keith eventually separated their hug and took in Shiro’s face, but his heart sunk as he realized that Shiro’s facial features were muddied and warped. When he spoke, it was with some generic baritone voice that Keith knew wasn’t his; when Keith tried to call up the real deal, he found he couldn’t.

 

Keith grabbed at Shiro again, but this time, he was untouchable. He pulled at Shiro’s arm, tried to punch him in the gut, pressed his lips to Shiro’s lips, but none of it held feeling anymore.

It was gone. _He_ was gone. Those phrases ran through Keith’s mind like a mantra that he didn’t want, but he had to accept it. Yet here he was, right there! The reality and non-reality of it frustrated Keith so much that he slammed his foot down on the bleachers, expecting the pain of the metal slamming into his shin to ground him, but he felt nothing. of course.

Since when had he been standing?

 

“Why are you here?” Keith tried, hating how his dream-voice sounded completely normal when his mind was screaming at the simulation it created. He was supposed to be good at simulations - at least, that’s what they told him at the Garrison before he washed out a month ago.

Shiro’s mouth moved as if he was replying, but nothing intelligible came out. He laughed at something he said, his own joke, but Keith’s mind couldn’t even remember what that sounded like, so it didn’t bother to conjure up a single sound.

The dream began fading away; Keith was regaining consciousness. He scrambled and fought at the last remnants of the dream, trying to twist it into shapes he wanted now that he had control, but it was like sand slipping through his fingers. He could feel his physical body tugging at him. The morning sunlight was burning at his eyelids and his left leg itched, but he reached out for Shiro anyway, only to find that the bleachers were morphing into a shape that rendered contact nearly impossible.

 

Keith reached out his hand a final time, just barely skimming Shiro’s fingers, but felt nothing when they made contact.

His eyes flew open. He laid there in a resting position for a while, his mind racing to process the final moments of the dream, and finally came upon a single conclusion.

 

That was the first time Keith had a dream in which he realized that Shiro was dead.

 

Keith slowly curled up on the bed in his shack, bringing his knees to his chest, and closed his eyes. He half-hoped Shiro would be there behind them, back on those bleachers and whole this time, but Keith was only met with the burning red of the sunlight against his eyelids. He flipped over; the red was gone, and in its place was endless black.

Keith didn’t know when he started crying, but it overtook him gradually, so slowly that he only realized that he was crying when he made a soft whimper into the side of his pillow. His chest burned, physical pain creeping up through his body, and no matter how hard he curled into himself, it wasn’t relieved. It was as if something was gone inside him, snatched out with clawed fingers. The wound left behind burned like nothing else could.

When he searched his mind, lost in it, Keith was sure he would only find one word like he had lately:  _Shiro_. Yet this time, there was something else - the word that dream-Shiro was murmuring. It felt strange on his mind to think, even stranger on his tongue to whisper, but it left a shimmering salve on the edges of the ragged wound in his chest. It was irrevocably, indescribably, bafflingly linked to Shiro’s memory now.

 _Voltron_.

 

Keith sat up slowly, wiping the tears off his face with the back of his hand, and kept his knees close to his chest. The word knocked around in his head, hitting Shiro’s name a couple of times, before settling down right in the center of his tunnel vision.

It didn’t replace Shiro. Instead it lifted him up in Keith’s mind, somehow, and gave existence a lighter feeling than the dull swamp it seemed like lately. Keith even felt more optimistic about getting out of bed this morning, slowly swinging his legs over the edge, and he sighed a little as he was met with his bedraggled reflection in the mirror across the bedroom.

He was sleep-jostled, and tear tracks and red rimmed eyes were his look for the day, it seemed, but this morning, it felt a little more manageable. He swallowed the metaphorical pill and got ready for the day.

 

Even if Shiro was a finality in every aspect of Keith’s life now, he entertained the idea that Voltron could fill some of the gap. Shiro would always be with him, of course, but as his subconscious had already showed signs of moving on, maybe his conscious should, too.

He just needed to find out what Voltron was first.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was kind of personal for me, actually, and was really cathartic to write, so i hope it came out not totally painful to read
> 
> comments/kudos are greatly appreciated!


End file.
